Prose poem — In this house he’s the center of gravity, the big bang of the mess of toys and things around his contented self. He snatches papers from my desk and throws them up, delighting in the flutter of their fall. …

The managerial bias in success narratives — I look up at skyscrapers with fascination and dread. What’s it like to own one or likely several of these, or to sit at the helm of a multimillion-dollar company commanding hundreds to thousands of employees spread transnationally? My smaller mind can’t fathom the scale. …

A poem — There is an infinitely vast anti-library of partial manuscripts that includes the unfinished, discarded works of masters of the written word. Indiscriminately mixed into that enormous pile of invisible refuse are the greater works of lesser writers unrealized or unread maybe even unwritten. This anti-library, consigned to the margins, to the…

Poetry — Dragging my load of trash one dewy morning to an overladen bin, I was held back by the browned, withered heads of a discarded bouquet of chrysanthemums peering at me from beneath the sagging weight of random greasy refuse — The mums were — or what used to be, before they…

How to not cruelly hope for children with developmental delays — When Joaquin was first diagnosed with developmental delay, one of the questions the doctor asked was, “Does he come to you with an object, any object that he likes, and shows it to you? Just to show it to you. Not to make you do something with it.” Like, does…

When a sinister sublime weaponizes your emotional wounds — Spoilers ahead. With mentions of self-harm and suicide. As Den of Geek’s Alec Bojalad correctly noted, the entities as drawn by Gary in the first Bird Box film were Lovecraftian: deeply, disturbingly dark, and one of them even has facial tentacles like Cthulhu. If Bird Box’s invisible assailants were indeed…

Why I found this season of Netflix’s The Witcher personally unsettling — Includes Season 3 Vol. 1 ending spoilers and book spoilers. Season 3 opens with the little family of Geralt, Yennefer, and Ciri traveling together, on the run, going from one temporary home to another and paying their accommodations’ owners for their “discretion.” …

How do you tell a forbidden story? Draw the scene. — Here goes. I’m drawing the scene. And I’m going to change some details so I can deny its association with a real location, and with real people in my life. But I’m going to play up the details that drew me in when this person — let’s call him Santi…

Three tales — In the midst of pandemic lockdowns, my work-displaced chef husband turned his mom’s garage into an “essentials” food store. In the Philippines, the essentials were rice, cured meats, and frozen meals. Francis, my husband, printed a hundred copies of his store’s price list. He thought, he could walk around the…